A "carnival of resistance" to library closures will take place on 5 February 2011, with over forty library "read-ins" scheduled in a coordinated protest over the threatened closures.
Local events are being organised from Hounslow, Brixton and Lewisham, to Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Doncaster and Oxfordshire, with many writers – including Philip Pullman, Mary Hoffman, Malcolm Rose and Carole Matthews – due to take part.
Author Alan Gibbons, who has been a leading voice in the library protests, said the read-ins were a "carnival of resistance to closures", and that the government was "feeling the heat", with even former Tory lead Iain Duncan Smith's think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, voicing concerns that badly planned cuts could lead to services being sacrificed unnecessarily.
Gibbons promised a celebration of reading complete with balloons, storytelling and music. "The public love and celebrate their libraries," he said. "Isn't it time the government turned its back on its destructive and disproportionate closure programme and did the same?"
Meanwhile campaigners on the Isle of Wight – the hardest hit of any area, with nine out of 11 branch libraries due for closure – have echoed the eye-catching Stony Stratford protest which led members to empty library shelves by simultaneously taking out their full allowance of loans.
On Saturday, protestors emptied the crime fiction section of the island's biggest library, the Lord Louis library in Newport.
[. . .]
There are currently almost 450 libraries and mobile libraries threatened with closure as a result of local authority budget cuts, according to the Public Libraries News website.
Just this week LinkedIn launched InMaps, an interactive tool to help you visualize your professional network. Once you plug in your username and password, the site spits out colourful groupings of interconnected dots that represent your various connections. Depending on the size of a contact's network, the dots and fonts are bigger.
While I love a good visualization tool as much as the next Web geek, I'm not hooked on LinkedIn. I realize I am in one of two camps here. There are people such as my best friend who can be found only on LinkedIn. Facebook? She has no interest in Zuckerberg's baby. For her, she likes the business side of LinkedIn to maintain professional relationships. For me, I log into LinkedIn once in a while to approve requests, but I find myself at a loss insofar as what to do next.
This isn't to say that I don't appreciate the site. After all, they have more than 90 million members in more than 200 countries. Approximately two million of these users are here in Canada. Last week Bloomberg reported that the site is worth around $3-billion. For business-to-business networking, it's a valuable tool. When searching for a job, LinkedIn is an easy-to-use platform to showcase your work history and to seek out potential employers. It's also handy to find professional contacts who might be linked to one of your colleagues or friends.
However, if you're not doing any of those things and you're more of a “Chatty Cathy,” (as one boss described me in San Francisco in the late 1990s), chances are you'll lean towards tools like Twitter and Facebook, which lend themselves to casual conversations. Also, if you like keeping in touch with friends and family, LinkedIn probably isn't the place to see your high school buddy's new baby photos or plan your Christmas party.
In June 1868, A. Bertram Mitford, then serving as British consul in Osaka, wrote a most interesting letter about Japanese views on the Urakami Christians. Mitford had polled his Japanese friends, very likely the same politically well-connected friends who had provided him with the political intelligence on the imperial side that allowed the British to navigate skilfully through the tortuous months leading up to the Restoration. Mitford observed how little sympathy there was for the Urakami Christians among Japanese of all classes because they had begun to openly preach the Gospel in defiance of the government's prohibition. He stressed that the Japanese thought the Roman Catholic priests were trying to gain secular as well as spiritual power through their proselytizing activities in Urakami, known as a hotbed of anarchy and revolution. He also pointed out that a new Roman Catholic bishop had been appointed with the ill-chosen title of "bishop of Japan," which Japanese regarded as "thoroughly offensive to the pride of the nation." The Japanese saw the crisis in political terms: as a challenge to the political power of the government. According to Mitford, the Japanese already believed that Roman Catholic fathers were exerting an unfortunate influence on the Urakami Christians by forbidding them, to sell flowers as decoration in local temples and shrines and by preaching sedition and treason, which had led to the tearing down of images of the native gods. The spectre of religious warfare was raised.
The Japanese were too diplomatically astute to deny the excellence of Christian teaching but did argue that "the school of Urakami is but a bastard form of Christianity," that the Roman Catholic priests were not famihar enough with the Japanese language to explain the dogmas of their religion, and that the Urakami Christians had little in common with true Christian. This argument was in keeping with a common snub about the missionaries language ability, with the hint that the Japanese knew a little bit more about the true nature of Christianity and of Urakami Christian beliefs than the Roman Catholic missionaries did. Mitford wrote, "The Japanese claim a high degree of merit for their own faith, which for centuries has taught the people the duties of children and parents, husbands and wives, masters and servants, brothers and friends. This is the religion which the people understand; the mystic doctrines of the Fathers only bewilder them." Mirroring the contemporary position, he then added, "The danger of a little knowledge in matters of religion is shown by the Taiping Rebellion, which founded on a few Christian tracts, at one time threatened to lay waste the Chinese Empire." Elements of Christianity could be seen in the ideology of the Taiping rebels, and 1868, the year in which Mitford was writing was only four years after that destructive rebellion's final defeat. Although it is difficult to see the Urakami Christians leading a rebellion with the same impact on Japan as the Taiping had on China, the new government saw them-as a danger because they could spark a resurgence of armed Tokugawa opposition to the government's rule. In any case, despite Western ministers' calls for the Meiji government to take a more moderate stance, Mitford thought the government was still going ahead with its policy to scatter the Urakami Christians throughout the territories of different daimyo. Mitford's intelligence was very good, for this scattering of Christians was, in fact, carried out. It was all about politics and political power.
The $1.4-billion TTC is a huge financial drain on Toronto, which is virtually alone among major cities in subsidizing day-to-day transit operations on property taxes alone. A complete provincial takeover would free the city to spend elsewhere the $429-million it gives the TTC annually as an operating subsidy. A partial takeover, on the other hand, could be the worst of both worlds for Toronto. If, for example, the province picked up a cash cow like the Yonge subway and left money-bleeding bus routes behind, the city would cede control without reaping adequate savings.
The province: Swallowing the TTC wouldn’t come cheap. Along with paying the system’s $429-million annual operating subsidy, the province would have to assume the municipality’s share of capital projects and purchases. On the bright side, the province, through regional transportation authority Metrolinx, would own new lines outright, allowing it to spread the cost of future subway or light-rail projects over time. The critical question for riders is whether the deficit-laden province could afford to feed more money to the cash-starved TTC. “That’s the big elephant in the bedroom here,” said Ed Levy, a transportation consultant. “Without proper funding, you can change the administration as much as you like and I don’t know what benefit it’s going to have.”
Giving the subways over to the province might not make much difference to riders, but when it comes to buses and streetcars, you could be giving the responsibility to a bureaucrat living in a different city with no accountability to the Toronto electorate, said public transit advocate Matthew Blackett, publisher of Spacing magazine.
“If you turn control over to someone who potentially doesn’t live here, doesn’t represent here, then you have people making decisions they’re not accountable for,” he said.
Uploading only subways to the province would be a mistake, said Ryerson professor emeritus Jim Mars.
“Almost all buses and streetcars pass through subway stations, allowing an inexpensive, if occasionally slow, trip for any passenger throughout (the city of Toronto). To upload only the subways would put this system at risk,” he said.
There’s nothing some city councillors would like better than to be rid of the $429 million TTC subsidy that comes out of Toronto’s operating budget.
But that’s not in the cards, say senior officials in Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government — especially with an election looming Oct. 6. Finance Minister Dwight Duncan shot down the latest speculation Tuesday about the province taking over the TTC or at least the subway.
There are “no” plans to upload the TTC, said the minister, who is striving to cut 13 provincial agencies to cope with the treasury’s massive shortfall. Already saddled with an $18.7 billion deficit, the Liberals simply cannot afford to relieve the city’s budgetary problems.
The idea of a takeover came up briefly in discussions between Queen’s Park and Mayor Rob Ford’s administration, according to a city hall source.
The province said it couldn’t finance the subway extensions the mayor so desperately wants because the city owns those lines, unlike the proposed light rail routes, which would have been owned by Metrolinx.
Someone in the mayor’s office asked if the subways could be built if the province owned the system. “But no, there was never a discussion,” said the source.
The mayor’s office downplayed the idea Tuesday, as did TTC chair Karen Stintz.
“We need to take a regional view of our transit system, and how we achieve that regional view we can do a number of ways before we would ever enter into a discussion about provincial takeover of the system,” Stintz said.
TTC vice-chair Peter Milczyn favours a new model to operate transit, but said it’s not realistic to think the province would pick up the full cost. “At best there’d be some kind of cost-sharing formula,” he said.
Although he said he has never discussed the idea with the mayor’s office, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti backs a provincial takeover. “If we were relieved of the costs of this monster then we (could) make some very valuable decisions,” he said, referring to services such as garbage pickup.
But Metrolinx president Bruce McCuaig said the idea is not even being considered. “We have been told by the province that they are not considering uploading at this time,” he told the Star.
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